A human ear

Svetlana Alexievich's Nobel lecture:

Flaubert called himself a human pen; I would say that I am a human ear. When I walk down the street and catch words, phrases, and exclamations, I always think – how many novels disappear without a trace! Disappear into darkness. We haven't been able to capture the conversational side of human life for literature. We don't appreciate it, we aren't surprised or delighted by it. But it fascinates me, and has made me its captive. I love how humans talk ... I love the lone human voice. It is my greatest love and passion.

A very compelling piece - worth a read. I've only read the Chernobyl book, but I've acquired a couple of the others and am hoping to read them in January.

A bucket of meat

Excited to see that Svetlana Alexievich has been given the Nobel Prize for Literature. I've only read one of her books, but it's really one of the most memorable things I've ever read (I have a long quotation from it in my style book): here were my thoughts when I read Voices from Chernobyl almost ten years ago.

Happiness!

My dear friend Jane Yeh has been chosen for the Poetry Society's Next Generation list, issued once a decade. Not so well-known in the US as in the UK, but this is a BIG DEAL! These are poems that everyone who loves language and play should be reading.

Tooth and throat singing

A good error correction in this story at the Times:

An article on Thursday about Caroline Shaw, who won the Pulitzer Prize for music this week, referred incorrectly to a vocal technique explored by a group she has sung with, Roomful of Teeth. It is Tuvan throat singing — a tradition of the Tuvan people of Siberia — not “tooth and throat” singing.

Catch-up

Fruit stencils! This is an amazing piece, very much worth clicking through to....

Snoozed alarm for too long this morning and am trying to gear up to get out the door for my run. It is supposed to snow again later, so that's a good incentive to get it done now. Afternoon of grad student appointments and a rather overdue haircut, so I am not sure I will get in a second session later, though I might go to 6:30 hot yoga if I'm done at the hair place in time. (I like having quite short hair, only it's high-maintenance, and it always makes me grumpy to give up an early-evening exercise session in order to be sheared!)

I'm 90% ready to dig in on proper revisions for the two things I'm working on this month, a long-delayed essay on particular detail and the novel and the final revisions on the style book. Need one more session of preliminary work on style, then I will go for it and start really taking the particular detail piece apart and putting it back together in final form. Read enough of the remaining stack of Young Lions submissions last night to submit my rankings - we meet to decide the five-book longlist in early March. Job talks for the postcolonial search are now over; will need to read some materials before that meeting, also in early March.

Miscellaneous light reading: one more Imogen Robertson, Island of Bones; Erin Celello, Learning to Stay (I followed Erin's Ironman training blog obsessively in 2007, the first year I was really fixated on triathlon: on which note, I think this really is the year when I will be able to pull off my Ironman, having been derailed twice before by calamity and illness); Ann Leary's delightful The Good House; Chuck Wendig's Mockingbird, which I hugely enjoyed and which is exactly the sort of book I most wish I could write myself, only somehow I cannot; and my graduate school colleague M. E. Breen's lovely YA novel Darkwood, which has some minor unevenness in terms of introduction of worldbuilding and plot stuff but which is riveting in terms of character and storytelling.

Decisions, decisions

Heading for the airport in an hour.

Read a couple good novels over the weekend for the Young Lions Fiction Award, but discretion suggests I should not blog about them.

The material in the opening chapters of Thinking, Fast and Slow felt over-familiar; I hasten to add that this is not Kahneman's fault, it simply speaks to how very influential and widespread this work on decision-making would later become. The middle and later chapters were increasingly rewarding and thought-provoking.

Things that speak to my experience most directly: regression to the mean clearly explains what happens when you are on a search committee and the candidate who gave a spectacular first-round interview at MLA is disappointing on campus; the general message to be wary of intuition and to embrace formulas is something that committees should keep very much in mind when reading for PhD admissions; and I am sorry to say (it is a very good chapter!) that everyone who is beginning a PhD degree or doctoral dissertation, a book, a home renovation or other major undertaking should read the chapter called "The Outside View" and consider the implications of baseline prediction and the planning fallacy (and revisit the commitment regularly with a view to considering the sunk-cost fallacy).

It is well-known that graduate admissions is a notorious crapshoot - I talked to a former DGS at Yale who had gone through old records (the program used long ago to rank incoming students in order of expectations for future contributions/eminence) to try and figure out what correlation there might be between those rankings and subsequent careers. There was none discernible.

I do think that years of experience have given me certain insights that are legitimate to apply: for instance, the qualities that lead someone successfully to obtain a Rhodes or Marshall Scholarship, which superficially might suggest aptitude for top-level research in the humanities (and will often ensure admission to top PhD programs), are often at odds with the kind of stubborn individualism and low-reward curiosity that really lead someone to excel at research in the humanities, and many of these students will intelligently reassess their choice a year into the PhD program and leave to do something that will be more stimulating and higher-profile in a larger pond elsewhere. When we give these students spots in our program (and they are likely to have multiple offers and take more lucrative ones at Harvard or Stanford!), we lose the chance to admit the less orthodox but perhaps more temperamentally suited students who have not got such uncheckered undergraduate records.

Now I must stop blogging and start packing!

Closing tabs

No Pulitzer for fiction this year.  It wasn't a suitable shortlist, I think: only one 'real' novel, the other two of the three were a reprinted novella from almost ten years ago and a posthumously cobbled-together book.  It is an oddity of group decision-making that this sort of situation can easily lead to a deadlock, especially when two different groups are responsible for the shortlist and the final determination.

Pitching a 33 1/3 book. (Via.) I've long had a yen to write one of these, but I have too many other projects lined up already, I think.

One of the 'places of power' for my novel rewrite: I will have to see what I can do with this.

I want this book!  (Phenomenon of really useful out-of-print books = prohibitive pricing; I will get it from the library....)

Last but not least: Japanese penguin goes shopping!

Going underwater

Sheila Heti interviews Joan Didion for the Believer. (And I hesitate to link to it, since I think much of it is preposterous, but I did find that Caitlin Flanagan's piece on Didion in the Atlantic held my attention....)

The Flatt Prize will award $1000 to the winner of its short-story competition.

I have a minor but unpleasant cold; hoping to make a bit of headway this afternoon with the second half of the novel revisions (I sent a new version of the first half to my editor on Tuesday, which was good).  February is going to be a demanding month, and so is March, and April always is because of structural things about the shape of the school year, so I am endeavoring to push hard but also to pace myself for what is essentially an ongoing challenge that runs through the middle of May!

Postscript

I seem to have spent the whole day narrowly avoiding a minor meltdown, for no evident reason, though I definitely wasn't feeling well yesterday either - and have made myself feel very bad by skipping the workouts I should have done, which is doubly foolish because doing at least one of them would almost certainly have made me feel better! The weather in New York right now is not conducive to bike-riding, it must be said, though I intend to get out for my long run tomorrow afternoon even if it is snowing...

But now that the short list has been announced for the Young Lions Fiction Award, I am free to say that this was the award I was reading for earlier in the year. I won't say anything about books I read and didn't like (I have studiously avoided mentioning them here!), and the structure is such that one hasn't necessarily read all of the finalists, so I can only say that the two I did read from this list of five, John Brandon's Citrus County and Patricia Engel's Vida, were both highly worthwhile (my personal preference was slightly for the latter, but both are really worthy of recognition). And the book that I was startled didn't make it onto the short list (but it is the nature of group decision-making and consensus that things go this way) was one that I truly loved, Rosecrans Baldwin's You Lost Me There. Highly recommended!

Subcontinental, uncomplimentary

This Wikipedia entry for English words with uncommon properties will repay further attention at some more leisurely moment. (Prompted by Brent's sending me this link!)

The catalog of things that must get done in the next week and a half is busting my brain! However it is all good, I am very happy to be back in my teaching life and with all sorts of other appealing obligations of a more or less optional kind; only I had better activate my superpowers, I think...

(Among other things I am reading lots of novels as a member of the judging committee for a fiction prize and tantalizingly can't really say anything about them, good or otherwise, until the awards have been given and the prize is over and done with, at which point I don't see why I can't say some good things about the ones I have particularly enjoyed...)

I did read a good book last night that it will not contravene the embargo to mention: Jessie Sholl's Dirty Secret: A Daughter Comes Clean About Her Mother's Compulsive Hoarding. The content is excellent, and I am sure it will find a very wide audience; I did feel that it could have been an essay-length piece of absolute long-lived brilliance, and that something was sacrificed in the writing in order to make it a book-length piece, but it is still a very good book. Two paragraphs I particularly liked:

In June, I'm walking along the Hudson River as I sometimes do, when I notice that my iPod is sounding utterly fantastic. Because of the times I helped my dad test out his new audio gear, I can easily tell the difference between a crap stereo and a good one. And suddenly my iPod sounds as good as one of my dad's best systems.

I take out my earbuds. Did I buy new ones and not remember? They look the same. Besides, I would remember. And my iPod certainly hasn't changed. I put the earbuds back in and switch from the Lemonheads to Outkast. Again, the music sounds excellent. I try Radiohead, the Rolling Stones, PJ Harvey. I'm hearing individual parts to the songs that I haven't noticed, or at least appreciated, before. And these parts are coming together to create a vastly wider spectrum of sound. I continue walking, blown away by what I'm hearing, still baffled as to why. And then I realize: It's the Wellbutrin. I'd become so depressed that everything had gone flat, including music. Now it's round again.

Bonus link to my favorite PJ Harvey song:

Proust would just have stayed in bed

At More Intelligent Life, Hilary Mantel on winning, losing and the consolation of guinea pigs.

The young and the restless

A public service announcement...

The Dylan Thomas Prize is offered by the University of Wales to a writer under 30 whose published book (it can be a novel, a collection of poems, a travel book, a play, etc. but I believe it needs to have been published in the last year - go and look at the specs for more details) is deemed by the prize committee most worthy of recognition. It need not have anything to do with Wales, and is open to writers of all nationalities! It is a large cash prize, and they are eager for submissions, so please forward this announcement widely if you know of anyone who might be interested.

Entries must be received by 30 April 2010.